None of these people was free; not a single Egyptian was, in our sense of the word, free. No individual could call in question a hierarchy of authority which culminated in a living god. But it must not be forgotten that the reverse of freedom, isolation of the individual with or without “inalienable rights,” was likewise lacking in Egypt. And servitude loses much of its sting if authority rests with those to whom faith has attributed the power of safeguarding the existence of society. Moreover, if it was true that all were at the disposal of the divine ruler and his officials, it was also true that even the lowliest might appeal to him[155] and claim what was “right”—maat (justice, right, and truth)—by which the ruler and the other gods were said to live and which informed, or was supposed to inform, his functionaries.
There were no castes, and men of simple origin might rise to the highest posts. The life-story of one Uni under three successive kings of the Sixth Dynasty shows that even lower officials, without influential relations, could rise to the highest offices once their ability and integrity had been recognized. The talented and industrious were not frustrated by a rigid class distinction or by a colour bar. A Nubian, frankly calling himself Panehsi, “the Nubian,” or “negro,” might be found in the highest places. The educated men were assigned by Pharaoh to whatever offices he thought fit. The common people were mostly tied to the land which they tilled for their own living and for the maintenance of the state. We do not know whether or not they were serfs. We do know that they had to turn in a considerable proportion of their produce as taxes and that they were liable to corvée. A proportion of the young men of all villages and estates was levied for the army, which was really a militia, but functioned much more frequently as a labour corps, available for all kinds of public works. It was this “army” which was sent on quarrying and mining expeditions, which dug the canals and built the temples and the royal tombs. If additional labour was needed to undertake special tasks or to expedite those in hand, the population at large could be drafted. For instance, the number of men required for the building of pyramids ran into many thousands, and it is likely that the stone-cutters and their crews of unskilled helpers worked continuously in the quarries, the masons and their navvies on the site, but that during the inundation special levies were drafted to transport the stone from Tura, on the east bank, to Gizeh or Saqqara on the west bank of the Nile. For this purpose it was convenient that in summer, when the arable land was flooded, all agricultural labour came to a standstill, and the water covering the fields facilitated transport to the very foot of the desert plateau.[156]
We have some evidence of the life which these labourers lived. Three places are known where workmen were housed. Near the pyramid of Chephren at Gizeh there are, around a court, extensive barracks consisting of ninety-one galleries, each 88 feet long, 9½ feet wide, and 7 feet high. Petrie estimated that these could house 4000 men. Near the pyramid of Senusert II at Lahun there is a walled town covering an area 900 by 1200 feet. And at Tell el Amarna, near the northern group of rock tombs, is a walled village measuring only 210 by 210 feet ([Fig. 31]).[157] Its layout is dreary, with identical houses built back to back along straight streets. Each house consists of a court serving for kitchen and workshop, a central room as living-room, and two little bedrooms at the back. The enclosure wall has but one gate, opening on a square where the men no doubt mustered before being marched off to work. At one end of the square there is a larger house for the foreman or commandant. Described in this way the settlement makes the impression of a penal colony. But when one visits the site or reads the excavation report with some care, that impression changes. One is struck by the variations which one observes in going from house to house. Although the plans are identical, the tenants had made many changes to suit their individual needs and predilections. The internal arrangements are hardly ever the same. The objects found in the houses also show considerable variety and do not suggest penury or gloom. In one room was discovered a gay, painted frieze of dancing figures of the god Bes, the popular genius of music and love. One gets a distinct impression at the site that lack of freedom neither interfered with the home life of these workers nor destroyed their gaiety.
Abuses naturally existed. Royal decrees granting freedom from corvée, or levy, to the personnel of certain shrines explicitly protected these men against removal to other parts of the country, and show incidentally that common folk were exposed to this hazard. The small man was dependent on the protection of a man of influence whose client he might become if he was not already his serf. At this distance of time we cannot distinguish grades of servitude. It has been suggested that the best land of the large estates was worked with serfs while the less productive fields were let out to peasants who paid a fixed rent in produce; but the categories are not clearly distinguishable. Slaves, however, as distinct from serfs, did not play an important part in the economy of Egypt. It is doubtful whether they were kept in any numbers at all before the New Kingdom.[158] At that time the Syrian campaigns resulted in large numbers of captives who were used on royal and temple domains and in stone quarries. In earlier times captive Nubians may have been employed occasionally, but such isolated slaves served in families or at court as domestics, entertainers, dancers, or musicians and lived (one suspects) very much like the other servants. It has been pointed out[159] that the successful growing of grain requires a personal interest on the part of the cultivator, which slave labour lacks.
The craftsmen, too, were usually serving some great lord. Large numbers were employed by the king. We know, in fact, that the country was drained of talent for the benefit of the royal residence. The graves at Qau el Kebir—a cemetery in Middle Egypt used throughout the third millennium—show the scantiest equipment, and that of the poorest quality of craftsmanship, during the flourishing period of the Old Kingdom when the pyramids were being built. When the central government had collapsed in the First Intermediate period, both the quality and the intrinsic value of the grave goods at Qau increased greatly. When craftsmen worked for the court, it is almost certain that they, too, were not free agents selling their wares or their services where they pleased. But we must, once more, guard against exaggerating their lot; they were not slaves. We happen, for instance, to know something of the extensive linen factories of Pharaoh. Under the Sixth Dynasty a royal weaving establishment in the north was under the management of one Seneb, a dwarf who, having worked himself up from the ranks, married a woman of the class of “Royal Kinsman” and could afford to build himself a fine tomb at Gizeh, from which we get our information.[160] One of the scenes in this tomb depicts the giving of rewards to Seneb’s subordinates;[161] they receive headbands and necklaces, and this is significant, for these ornaments resemble in form the “gold” with which Pharaoh honoured officials of special merit. Let us assume that the jewellery with which the weavers were rewarded was less costly and consisted of bronze and fayence. It is nevertheless clear that the award was by no means a payment but a kind of gift which it was an honour to receive. Now it is noteworthy that the recipients depicted in Seneb’s tomb are not all overseers and foremen, but also men and women who are merely mentioned by name, without title, and who therefore must be assumed to be simple weavers.
Craftsmen also worked for officials and on the large estates which came into being towards the end of the Old Kingdom. Such estates, like the royal domains, and the temple estates of later times, were self-sufficient economic units. Each had its own wharves, for instance,[162] where Nile boats were built and repaired. These served not only as ferries, but for every trip of any length which the owner had to undertake and for the shipment of grain, cattle, and other dues to the magazines of the Exchequer. They were used, furthermore, for shipments of supplies to the funerary establishments of past members of the family who might be buried near Memphis in a royal cemetery. When the weakening of the central power, to which we have referred, and the concurrent rise of a landed gentry, made it more and more customary for high officials to be buried in rock-cut tombs near their estates in the provinces, the equipment of these tombs was supplied by masons, cabinet-makers, jewellers, and so on, employed on the estate. There were, moreover, hunters, who not only killed game, but caught it to be fattened for the table; several kinds of antelopes, cranes, and even hyenas were treated in this way. Fishermen and fowlers were also employed, for wild geese and duck, fattened in the barnyard, were consumed in large numbers. Fish was dried and kept, but it was probably largely used as rations for labourers.
As regards the cultivators, whether they worked for a private estate, for a temple, or on a royal domain, they had to pay imposts of many kinds, and the hamlets and villages were collectively responsible in the person of their head man; this worthy had to produce the stipulated amounts on the day of reckoning or he risked a beating. The craftsmen, too, were organized in groups of five or ten men under a foreman who received their rations of food, clothing, and raw materials and was responsible for their work. Similar groups of men, working in shifts of one month, functioned as “hour priests” in the temples and funerary chapels. When they took over, their foremen received the inventory and were responsible for its proper maintenance.
The material basis of the Egyptian commonwealth was agriculture, regulated by the unaltering rhythm of the inundation. The names of the three seasons (of four months each) which the Egyptians distinguished were “Inundation” (middle of July to middle November), “Coming Forth” (of the seeds, or possibly of the land from the inundation, from middle November to middle March), and “Drought.” The conditions prevailing in prehistoric times, described in the second chapter, were not materially altered during the Old Kingdom. Land had to be reclaimed from the marshes. We have seen that the first king, Menes, undertook such work on a considerable scale. But the more the valley was drained, the more the need arose to distribute the inundation water so that it reached all the fields. From the beginning of the First Dynasty annual records of the height of the Nile were kept; their purpose can only have been to provide a basis for an estimate of its extent and thereby of the probable yield of the harvest. The digging of canals and the building of dikes was normally done by the central government, but there are some indications that the king encouraged the nomarchs to reclaim land by granting them the new fields which they then were allowed to settle with people from their estates. In the First Intermediate period when each nomarch had to take care of his area as best he could, one of them records:
I stocked villages in this nome that were enfeebled with cattle and men of other nomes, and those who had been serfs elsewhere I made rank as notables.[163]
The annual inundation with its fertilizing deposit of silt made manuring and rotation of crops unnecessary. The tax records distinguish between low land, which was regularly inundated, and high land, which came under water only when the flood was high. This land was used for grazing or truck gardening. The bulk of the arable land was left soft by the retreating inundation and could be worked with primitive wooden hoes and ploughs. Animals, mostly sheep, were used to tread in the seed, and this had to be done speedily after the land had emerged but before it became hard and dry. Six-rowed barley and emmer wheat were the main crops. Lettuce, onions, beans, and lentils were, in antiquity as now, important secondary products. Ricinus plants were grown for oil, and flax for linen.